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Cultural Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and the Collapse of Communism

Cultural Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and the Collapse of Communism

GENERAL INFORMATION

Date: Wrocław, Poland, 19-21 September 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS

Cultural Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and the Collapse of Communism

The end of World War II saw large parts of Central European countries in ruin. The borders were changed after the Potsdam conference, leading to mass deportations and resettlement of millions of people. Vast areas of multi-ethnic borderlands that had been typical of the pre-World War II Eastern and Central Europe turned in most cases into monoethnic states. Cultural and national diversity, which had been the hallmark of what Hanna Arendt called „the belt of mixed populations”, albeit not without strife or conflict, virtually disappeared in most communist states, with the exception of Romania and the Yugoslavian federation. Landscape, always a palimpsest of human and natural layering in time, held traces of that erased presence of people exterminated during the war or evicted afterwards. The communist states began also the push toward modernization and collectivization, profoundly changing rural and urban landscapes. At the same time landscape became a crucial ideological arena for the communist state on which the successful story of human command of nature for the common good of the people was to be played out.

As witness and active agent of key historical events such as uprisings, wars, burials and revivals, landscape was the repository of national history and memory, contributing an essential scenery for commemoration practices. Irreversible damage to natural resources done by heavy industry was covered up with the politics of conservationism and ecological responsibility.

After the breakthrough of 1989, landscape was fundamentally transformed again by sweeping changes that affected the economy and created hybrid combinations of industrial and post-industrial urban space. Moreover, government was decentralized and the new freedom was used to construct new collective identities (a turn to regional forms of belonging, transborder solidarities and common histories and, at the same time, a weakening of centralised national affiliations). Likewise, privatization of space commodified landscape, challenging the sense of commonality in the experience of public space, while, on the other hand, civic thinking about ecology and environmental openness gained ground.

We would like to invite scholars in the field of humanities and social sciences who will share their perspectives on the reordering of physical and social space in Central Europe after World War II and after the collapse of communism.

The following points, among others, could provide prompts for our discussions:

The conference will be held in Wrocław, Poland, 19-21 September 2018. It is a joint venture between the Academia Europaea (Knowledge Hub, Wrocław) and the Faculty of Philology of the University of Wrocław. A selection of papers will be published. The conference is part of a series of symposia, which bring together established scholars with early career researchers, particularly from East Central Europe.

APPLICATION:
The registration is available at: www.acadeuro.wroclaw.pl. Submit a 300-word proposal, a curriculum vitae with a list of publications by 28 February, 2018. All applicants will be notified about the selection of participants before 30 April, 2018.

REQUIREMENTS:
Presenters are required to submit a 3,000-5,000 word description or excerpt (i.e., chapter, article, etc.) to be circulated among participants by 15 August, 2018. All workshop participants are asked to read these submissions prior to the workshop. The paper should be an unpublished one. Presenters who do not meet the submission deadline will not be able to present their work.

THE SEMINAR LANGUAGE will be English.

FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS:
The organizers will cover the conference fee and the costs of accommodation (up to 4 nights), travel (up to a certain maximum: Western Europe – up to 100 EUR; Central and Eastern Europe – up to 150 EUR) and insurance.

All correspondence, including submission of proposals and final papers, must be addressed to: Katarzyna Majkowska (majkowska@acadeuro.wroclaw.pl) or via the registration form below.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Hana Cervinkova

University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw

Poland

Hana Cervinkova is the Rector and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Education at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from New School for Social Research in New York in 2004 and her Habilitation degree in Educational Studies at ULS in 2013. She is an author of numerous books and articles on in which she focuses on transformation processes in Central Europe with particular focus on education, memory and urban space. In her current ethnographic research she is interested in school-based civic education in Poland (MCS Horizon 2020 ITN Project).

Cervinkova serves on the board of eight scholarly journals and between 2012 and 2016 she was the member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. She is active in the area of international education programs. In 2016 she received (together with Juliet Golden) the Award for Excellence in Education Abroad Curriculum Design by the Forum on Education Abroad, for the course Negotiating Identities Across Europe’s Borders at Syracuse University and the University of Lower Silesia.

The Nation and the Phantomic Other. Producing Citizenship in the Polish School Curriculum.

This paper is based on the author’s ongoing ethnographic research on citizenship education in Polish schools. It will speak to the ongoing struggle between different conceptions of citizenship (civic vs cultural, global vs. national) that transpire in Polish school practices and curriculum and which rely on competing approaches to history and historical memory. The author is interested in how young people navigate the highly politicised landscapes of citizenship education and imagine themselves as citizens through the historical prism.

Pieter C. Emmer studied History and Economics at the University of Leiden and obtained a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Amsterdam in 1974. Since then he has been teaching at the History Department of the University of Leiden as a Professor in the History of the Expansion of Europe and the related migration movements. He was a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK (1978-1979), at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2000-2001) and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2002-2003), Wassenaar, The Netherlands. He served as Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin (1986-87) and at the University of Hamburg, Germany (1996-97). In 2004 Pieter Emmer was elected an ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Siegfried Huigen is Professor of Dutch Literature at the University of Wrocław and Visiting Professor of Dutch Literature and Cultural History at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. His research interests are travel writing and the history of colonial science and scholarship. He is the author of De weg naar Monomotapa (The Road to Monomotapa, 1996) and Knowledge and Colonialism; Eighteenth-century Travellers in South Africa (2007 and 2009). He co-edited several books on South African politics of memory and the history of colonial knowledge. In 2013 Siegfried Huigen was elected an ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Dorota Kołodziejczyk is Director of Postcolonial Studies Center at Institute of English Studies, Wrocław University, co-founder of the international Research Center for Postcolonial and Posttotalitarian Studies, co-founder and board member of research network Postdependence Studies Center. She also taught at SUNY University at Buffalo as the Kosciuszko Foundation visiting scholar 2002-2004. She specializes in postcolonial studies and comparative literature. Author of articles on postcolonial/East-Central European intersections in edited volumes from Routledge, Rodopi, Universitas; co-editor of Historie, społeczeństwa, przestrzenie dialogu: Studia post zależnościowe w perspektywie porównawczej, Universitas 2014, Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe, 2016. Translator and translation editor of postcolonial theory.

Katarzyna Majkowska studied Polish Philology (MA) at the University of Wrocław. She finished Postgraduate Studies in Event Management at the Wrocław School of Banking. Since March 2011 she has been working in Convention Bureau Wrocław, and from December 2011 works at the Academia Europaea Knowledge Hub Wrocław.

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Stanley Bill

University of Cambridge

UK

Stanley Bill works largely on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, with particular interests in religion, secularization theory, Polish-Ukrainian relations, and postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural history. He has written on Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, postcolonial theory in the Polish context, Polish Romanticism, as well as on religious problems in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Dr Bill worked at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow before coming to Cambridge. He completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in the United States. He originally hails from Perth, Australia.

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Tomasz Zarycki

Warsaw University

Poland

Tomasz Zarycki, Sociologist, Professor and Director of the Institute of Social Studies, Warsaw University. Specializes in the sociology of politics, culture and knowledge, critical theory, discourse analysis and social geography. Author of books „Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe” (2014), „Peripheries. New approaches to centre-periphery relations” (2009), „Cultural Capital. The Intelligentsia in Poland and Russia” (2008) and „Region as a Context of Political Behavior” (2002).

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Jennifer Croft

freelance translator

Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Cullman, Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell and NEA grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and a Tin House Scholarship for her novel Homesick, originally written in Spanish. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Guernica, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune and elsewhere

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Kristin Kopp

University of Missouri

USA

Kristin Kopp is associate professor of German Studies, and faculty affiliate in film studies and Black studies at the University of Missouri. She earned her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at Harvard University before arriving at MU in 2005. She has since been a visiting professor at the university in Oldenburg, Germany, and is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Her research has largely focused on the presence of colonial discourse within Europe, which is the subject of Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (University of Michigan Press, 2012). She has also published on German-Polish questions more generally, German colonial culture, and German film, with four co-edited books in these areas, including Germany, Poland, and Postmemorial Relations: In Search of a Livable Past (with Joanna Niżyńska, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She recently completed an international research collaboration at the Viennese Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society investigating the geopolitics of travel during the interwar period (exhibition: www.colinrossproject.net); and is now involved in two further collaborative projects: one to construct a sourcebook on interwar “Red Vienna,” and a second seeking to more fully integrate the history of Black people in Europe into the field of Black studies (www.blackcentraleurope.com)

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Mariusz Czepczyński

Gdańsk University

Poland

Mariusz Czepczyński is a cultural geographer, professor at the Department of Spatial Management, Institute of Geography, University of Gdańsk, Poland. His research interests are focused on cultural landscapes, post-socialist cities, heritage, urban cultures, critical geographies, quality of life, and local and regional development. He studied at the Universities of Gdańsk and Warsaw, and attended courses at the University of Oslo (1997), Harvard School of Design (1993), and Center for Land Policy Studies and Training, Taoyuan, Taiwan (2016). In 2009 – 2011 he had been employed at the Geographical Institute of the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. His activities also include consultancy and advisory roles, recently to the mayor of Gdańsk, Polish Metropolitan Union, City Hall of Lodz and Thuringian Ministry for Economy, Labour and Technology. He was deputy coordinator at the RECOURSE Research and Education Centre for Urban Socio- Economic Development – Centre of Excellency within the 5th Framework Programme. Professor Czepczyński coordinates, together with Greater London and Belgian the Roeselare, Energy Transition Partnership in the Urban Agenda for the EU project (2017-2019). His major publications include books Public Space. Between Reimagination and Occupation (eds. with S. Hristova, Routledge: 2018), Cultural Landscape of Post-Socialist Cities. Representation of Powers and Needs (Ashgate: 2008), The City during the Times of Transformation: Experiencing 20 Years of Self-Governance in Gdansk (in Polish, ed. Poznań: 2011), Spaces of the post-socialist cities. Social transformations of urban areas (in Polish, ed. Poznań: 2006), Featuring the Quality of Urban Life in Contemporary Cities of Eastern and Western Europe (eds. with I. Sagan, Gdańsk: 2004). He was a member of Investigating Cultural Sustainability COST Action Programme and the Metropolitan Working Group of the Polish Academy of Sciences

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Frank Uekotter

University of Birmingham

UK

Frank Uekotter is a reader in environmental humanities at the University of Birmingham. His most recent books include The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2014) and, as editor, Exploring Apocalyptica. Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). He is currently completing an environmental history of the modern world

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Roma Sendyka

Jagiellonian University, Kraków

Poland

Roma Sendyka(dr habil., associate professor), Director of the Research Center for Memory Cultures, teaches at the Center for Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Polish Studies Department, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Founder of the Curatorial Collective. Specializes in criticism and theory, visual culture studies, and memory studies. Focuses on relations between images, sites and memory, currently working on a project on non-sites of memory in Central and Eastern Europe. Co-editor of book series „New Humanities” (Polish Academy of Science).
Head of the research project Awkward objects of genocide. Vernacular art on the Holocaust and ethnographic museums, developed within the project Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production (Horizon2020, Reflective Society, 2016-2019), and of a project titled Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (National Programme for the Development of Humanities, 2016-2019). Published Nowoczesny esej [The Modern Essay, 2006], Od kultury ja do kultury siebie [From I to Self. A Cultural Turn 2015]; co-edited four books on memory studies. Awarded in Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Program, Patterns Program (Erste Stiftug), by EHRI, and Kościuszko Foundation. In 2011 taught at the University of Chicago.

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Craig Young

Manchester Metropolitan University

UK

Craig Young is Professor of Human Geography in the Division of Geography and Environmental Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His research interests include a focus on the cultural geographies and politics of identity (from the individual to the urban and the nation) in the context of post-socialist transformation, particularly in the former Eastern Europe. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Eurasian Geography and Economics co-editor of Cosmopolitan Urbanism (2006) and co-author of many articles on post-socialist identity formation in journals such as Nationalities Papers, Europe-Asia Studies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers

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Gregor Thum

University of Pittsburgh

USA

Gregor Thum a graduate of the Freie Universität Berlin and the Europa Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), teaches modern central European history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław During the Century of Expulsions (Princeton University Press, 2011) and currently completing a monograph that explores the history of Germany’s eastern frontier from the rise of the national movements in the early nineteenth century to the post-imperial Germany established after the Second World War

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Tomasz Zarycki

Warsaw University

Poland

Tomasz Zarycki, Sociologist, Professor and Director of the Institute of Social Studies, Warsaw University. Specializes in the sociology of politics, culture and knowledge, critical theory, discourse analysis and social geography. Author of books „Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe” (2014), „Peripheries. New approaches to centre-periphery relations” (2009), „Cultural Capital. The Intelligentsia in Poland and Russia” (2008) and „Region as a Context of Political Behavior” (2002).

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PARTICIPANTS

Dmitrijs Andrejevs

University of Manchester

UK

Dmitrijs Andrejevs is a doctoral research student at the University of Manchester, UK. His doctoral research project looks at the role of (in)tangible traces of communism within urban fabric of Riga (Latvia), focusing on the Freedom alley/ boulevard (Brīvības aleja/ bulvāris), Riflemen square (Strēlnieku laukums), and Victory park (Uzvaras parks). The project is generously funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and President’s Doctoral Scholar Award at the University of Manchester. Prior to commencing work on a doctoral project, he completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Aberdeen and a master’s degree at the University of Liverpool.

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Oleksandr Androshchuk

National Academy of Sciences

Ukraine

Oleksandr Androshchuk is Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Contemporary History and Politics in the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He is an historian specializing in history of territorial and toponymic reforms in Ukraine in the 20th century and problems of regionalism/separatism on Post-Soviet area. In 2004 he defended his PhD thesis titled “Administrative and Territorial Changes in Ukrainian SSR: Planning, Implementation, Outcomes (The Second Half of 1940s – 1960s)”. In 2007-2008 he was Visiting Scholar of the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) as participant of The Carnegie Research Fellowship Program. He was grantee of The Center for Advanced Studies and Education (CASE, EHU, Vilnius, 2009-2010), Polish Committee for UNESCO (2010), Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies „Artes Liberales” (University of Warsaw, 2011). His publications include: Territorial division changes in Ukraine in the 20th century (2014, in co-authorship); „One Ukraine or many? Ukrainian regionalism in English-language scholarly publications” (Istoriohrafichni doslidzhennia v Ukraini, 27, 2017); „V.Chornovil and idea of federalization of Ukraine: evolution of views” (Ukrajns’kyj istorychnyj zhurnal, 1, 2010); „Maps and Boundaries: Images of Space and Territorial Disputes on the Borderland (Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova in the Post-Soviet Time)” (Perekriostki, No. 3-4, 2010). He is editorial board secretary of scientific journal Regional’na istoria Ukrainy (Institute of History of Ukraine).

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Nikola Baković

Justus Liebig University

Germany

Nikola Baković holds a BA in History from the University of Belgrade and MA in Central European History from the Central European University (Budapest). Since 2012, he works as archivist at Regional Historical Archives of Čačak (Serbia). His research interests include cultural history of Yugoslavia, history of socialism, memory studies, and history of everyday life. Since 2015, he is doctoral researcher and lecturer at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University in Giessen (Germany), with dissertation topic on ritual mobilities in socialist Yugoslavia.

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Anna Barcz

University of Dublin

Ireland

Anna Barcz holds a PhD in literary studies from the Instutute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. She is the author of „Ecorealism: From Ecocriticism to Zoocriticism in Polish Literature” (Katowice 2016) and „Animal Narratives and Culture: Vulnerable Realism” (Newcastle upon Tyne 2017). She has carried out research in the field of animal studies and environmental humanities. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute of the University of Dublin (2018/2019).

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Wojciech Bedyński

University of Warsaw

Polans

Wojciech Bedyński, PhD – historian and ethnologist, graduate of the University of Warsaw and the University of Paris-IV la Sorbonne, a former member of Collegium Invisibile and Ancien Pensionnaire Etranger de l’ENS. Currently an employee of the Center of Migration Research at the University of Warsaw. He conducted long-term research on memory of the life in multicultural society in pre-war Podkarpacie (over a hundred interviews in Poland, Ukraine and Israel). He was the head of the international research project ‚Landscape as a factor in creating identity’ and organized a conference of the same title in Jarosław in 2014. He is co-editor of two volumes on the cultural landscape in Central-Eastern Europe, as well as a monographic work on the monastery of Mayo in Ireland (Krakow 2015). Currently, he conducts extensive biographical research on social and territorial mobility in Giżycko, Poland.

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Gintarė Bernotienė

Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore

Lithuania

Gintarė Bernotienė studied Lithuanian Literature at the University of Vytautas Magnus in Kaunas and obtained PhD in Lithuanian Literature (2002) from the University of Vytautas Magnus and the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Lithuania).

She is a senior researcher, literary critic, academic staff member at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Department of Contemporary Lithuanian Literature, Vilnius, Lithuania (since 2006), member of Lithuanian Comparative Literature Association and managing editor of the academic journal Colloquia (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, since 2010).

Rima Bertašavičiūtė is a PhD candidate in Philology at the Algirdas Julius Greimas Centre for Semiotics and Literary Theory at Vilnius University. Her thesis topic: „Contemporary Lithuanian Essay: A Case of Identity” (scheduled defense: end of October, 2018). She has published several articles and a book chapter on Lithuanian literary and/or film essay (in Lithuanian and English) and has participated in several essay-centered international conferences (Salzburg, 2014, and Reading, 2015). Besides her essay-related work, she has translated books by Thomas Elsaesser and Judith Butler into Lithuanian (Paul Celan Fellow at IWM, Vienna, 2016) and is an avid Sherlock Holmes scholar.

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Uilleam Blacker

University College London

UK

Uilleam Blacker is Lecturer in Comparative Culture of Eastern Europe at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research focuses on cultural memory in east European cities that were affected by large-scale population shifts or losses during and after World War II. His book on this topic will be published soon by Routledge. He is currently beginning two research projects, one on the perception in Ukraine of the country’s diverse multi-cultural literary heritage, and the other on contemporary Ukrainian representations of the war in Donbas. He is co-author of Remembering Katyn (2012) and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (2013).

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Maria Cristache

Justus Liebig University

Germany

Maria Cristache is a PhD student at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University, Giessen. She holds an MA in Sociology of Consumption and Marketing from the University of Bucharest and an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University, Budapest. Her PhD thesis examines postsocialist transformations reflected in consumption practices and the domestic sphere in Romania. Her research interests are postsocialist studies, anthropology of consumption, material culture studies and museum studies.

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Agnès Dudych

University of Pavel Jozef Šafarik, Košice

Slovakia

Agnès Dudych is a PhD candidate in history and urban planning within a joint doctorate programme at the University of Pavel Jozef Šafarik in Košice and the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar financed by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action programme urbanHist. She graduated from urban planning and European studies at the University of Lille. Her research interests concern the urban development and particularly housing strategies in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime. Investigating the housing estate of Terasa in Košice, her dissertation aims to make a connection between the architectural entity and the cultural, political and economic context of its construction.

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Jakub Gawkowski

Central European University

Hungary

Jakub Gawkowski – graduate student at the History Department of the Central European University, art critic and curator. He studied at the University of Warsaw and the University of Silesia, from where he graduated with a degree in Art History. His research interests include the history of museum exhibitions in post-war Central Europe, socially engaged visual arts and connections between art, politics and memory. Among others, his articles have been published in Krytyka Polityczna, Magazyn Szum, Political Critique, Przekrój, Artalk.cz and Artportal.hu.

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Imke Hansen

Hamburg University

Germany

Dr. phil. Imke Hansen is a historian specializing in Eastern European Contemporary History, Memory Studies, and Oral History. Currently based at the NordOst Institut at Hamburg University, she researches social conditions of memory in the DFG-project “Jews and Germans in Polish Collective Memory”. Prior to joining the NordOst Institut, she was a faculty member at the interdisciplinary Hugo Valentin Centre at Uppsala University, where she taught at the international masters program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her doctoral dissertation (2012) entitled “Nie wieder Auschwitz!“ Die Entstehung eines Symbols und der Alltag einer Gedenkstätte (“Never again Auschwitz!“ The emergence of a symbol and the daily life of a memorial) was awarded the Polish Ambassador’s Prize and the International Auschwitz Foundation Award.

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Lea Horvat

University of Hamburg

Germany

Lea Horvat is a PhD student (2015 – ) at the Department of History at the University of Hamburg, focusing on contemporary history of (South-)Eastern Europe. Her project, supported by the German National Academic Foundation, investigates narratives of socialist mass housing in (Post-)Yugoslav space. She holds an MA in Art History and Comparative Literature from the University of Zagreb. In 2017 she was a teaching fellow at the Department of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University of Berlin, holding the course Prefabricated Mass Housing: Between Remodelling and Historical Reappraisal. She presented her research on housing, socialist built environment, everyday life, and popular culture in (post-)socialism at the various international conferences.

Jurga Jonutytė works as a senior researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. She has been teaching philosophy at VMU for 15 years (subjects such as Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Culture, Ecosophy and Theories of Memory). As a researcher Jurga Jonutytė works on oral narratives (individual life stories or memory narratives), analyzing them from the perspectives of phenomenology, post-phenomenology and post-structuralism. She is an author of the monograph Changes in the Concept of Tradition (2011) and a co-author of several collective monographs. She also works as a professional hand weaver.

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Antony Kalashnikov

University of Oxford

UK

Antony Kalashnikov is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. His current project is titled „Stalinist Monumental Art and Architecture, and the ‚Immortalization of Memory.'” It seeks to demonstrate that the intended audience of Stalinist monumental art and architecture was, at least in part, posterity. The project investigates the motives behind this circumstance and its effect on style and form. His recent publications include: “Strength in Diversity: Multiple Memories of the Soviet Past in the Russian Communist Party (CPRF), 1993-2004,” Nationalities Papers 45.3 (2017): 370-392; and “Interpellation in the Late Soviet Period: Contesting the De-Ideologization Narrative,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 58.1 (2016): 23-48. His paper „Stalinist Crimes and Ethics of Memory” is set to appear in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 19.3 (2018).

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Adam Kola

Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

Poland

Adam F. Kola is Assistant Professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, President of the Polish Comparative Literature Association and Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago. His research is focused on Slavic World Literature and East- and Central European intellectual and literary history of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as on knowledge transfer and the influence of East Central European émigrés on the development of the humanities and science in the West. In 2018, he published a book titled Socialist postcolonialism. Memory Reconsolidation, in 2011 – Europe in Polish, Czech and Croatian Discourse: Critical Reconfiguration, and in 2004 – Czech and Russian Slavophilism in Comparison. He is an editor of several volumes on the philosophy and ethics of interpretation, semi/peripheral humanities and comparative literature. He is the author of about 100 papers in Polish, Czech, Russian, German and English, and does translations from Czech and English into Polish.

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Mirja Lecke

Ruhr-University, Bochum

Germany

Mirja Lecke is chair of Slavic Literatures at Ruhr-University, Bochum (Germany). She has studied and worked in Münster, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kraków and Berkeley. She gained her doctoral degree 2001 in Münster with the thesis Narrated Enlightenment: The Polish Novel around 1800. Her academic interests include Russian literature of the imperial and post-soviet periods in postcolonial perspective, cosmopolitanism and modernism in Odessa as well as the Polish literature of the enlightenment and post-communist eras. Her publications include a monograph about the representation of the Western borderlands in Russian imperial literature: Westland. Polen und die Ukraine in der russischen Literatur von Puškin bis Babel (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015) and a co-edited volume on Russian-Georgian literary relations of the post-Soviet era (Россия-Грузия после империи, Москва: НЛО, 2018).

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Anna Olenenko

Khortytsia National Academy

Ukraine

Anna Olenenko is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Khortytsia National Academy (Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine) and a member of European Society for Environmental History and Y. Novytskyi Zaporizhia Scientific Society. She graduated from Zaporizhia National University in 2007 and got her PhD in history from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2013. Anna’s research interests are related to the environmental history of Ukraine, especially the Steppe region. She investigates all kinds of nature transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the historical memory about it. Anna has presented the results of her research at the conferences in Ukraine, Russia, Estonia, China, and Canada.

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Tetiana Perga

National Academy of Science

Ukraine

Tetiana Perga is senior researcher in the State Institution „Institute of World History” of National Academy of Science of Ukraine. She has a PhD in History from the Kiev State University named Taras Shevchenko, Kiev, Ukraine. She is a DAAD fellow in the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (2018). Her research interests are: environmental history, environmental movement in late Soviet Union, eco-nationalism, Chernobyl accident, pre- and post-Chernobyl transformations in Ukraine, peculiarities of national, regional and global environmental policy. She is an author of numerous articles on which she focuses on different aspects of environmentalism, memory and environment, changes of cultural landscape in Ukraine after 1991. She co-authored five books and authored book “Global environmental policy and Ukraine” (Nizhyn, 2014).

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Aleksandr Sautkin

Murmansk Arctic State University

Russia

Aleksandr Sautkin, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies at Murmansk Arctic State University (Murmansk, Russia). Member of the Russian Philosophical Society. Participant (lecturer and examiner) of the Russian-Norwegian joint Masters degree program in practical knowledge “Borderology”, which is implemented by the Murmansk Arctic State University and Nord University (Bodø, Norway). Head of a working group of annual International Kant and Bakhtin seminar (2013 – present). Research interests: the history of philosophy, philosophical anthropology, cultural studies. Currently, he focuses on the symbolic aspects of socio-cultural identity and the role of imagination in social processes. He is the author of a book in Russian and a chapter in a collective monograph “Philosophy in the Border Zone” in English (Oslo, 2015).

Stsiapan Stureika, PhD – historian, cultural anthropologist, full-time lecturer at the European Humanities University (Vilnius), holds the Chair of ICOMOS Belarus, and is an Associate Member of the International Committee on Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration.
The field of his current research interest is the theory of architectural heritage, community-based conservation projects, new museology. Since 2010 he has conducted several research projects on social aspects of heritage preservation, transformation of Cultural Landscapes of Belarusian Towns, urban movements for heritage preservation in Eastern Europe. In 2015 has won a Thesaurus Poloniae fellowship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland (implemented by the International Cultural Centre in Kraków). In 2016-2017 had prepared a Report on Developing Cultural Heritage Sector in Belarus for European Union-sponsored program Culture and Creativity.

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Jovana Vukcevic

University of Valladolid, University of Kosice, University Paris-Est, ATRIUM Rome

Spain/Slovakia/France/Italy

Jovana Vukcevic is currently engaged as a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher in the urbanHIST programme (studying in Slovakia, France, Spain and Italy), where she develops a research project on commodification and disneyfication of uncomfortable heritage of totalitarian regimes in Europe. Previously, she held the positions of teaching assistant at the University of Montenegro, researcher at the Leipzig Graduate School Global and Area studies, start-up scholar at the Bielefeld University and ZEIT Stiftung’s pre-doctoral fellow. She obtained her Erasmus Mundus Master degree from Charles University of Prague and EHESS Paris in the field of European studies, defending with honours her thesis “Commodification of the collective memory: Yugonostalgia as a marketing strategy”. She also holds a BA in Economics from University of Montenegro and an MA in Management from University of Nice. She presented her research papers at academic conferences in Berlin, Dakar, Dublin, Paris, Florence, Munich, Warsaw, etc. and participated in a number of European trainings and programs in the field of academia, youth development and media. During the past years, she was awarded a number of grants, prizes and scholarships from several prestigious institutions and projects, such as the French Government, ZEIT-Stiftung, Forum Alpbach, COST action, Erasmus Mundus, Horizon 2020, etc. She has already published articles in several international journals, conference proceedings and collective volumes on the topics of collective memory, heritage management, reconciliation, rural tourism and entrepreneurship. Her main research interests relate to the heritage and memory management, post-socialist urban and cultural transformations, dark tourism, as well as the public uses of history and institutionalisations of memory. Other than her research activities, Vukcevic is very active in the field of modernization of higher education in the Western Balkans, as a regional representative of the Western Balkans Alumni Association, working closely with the European Commission and higher education institutions from the region.

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Stephanie Weismann

University of Vienna

Austria

Stephanie Weismann is Hertha-Firnberg-Fellow (FWF) at the Institute of Eastern European History/University of Vienna. She was POLONEZ-fellow (NCN) at the Institute for Cultural Studies at UMCS Lublin 2017 – 2018 doing research on her current project “The Smellscapes of Lublin. An Olfactory History of the 20th Century in East Central Europe”. The study asks how Lublin’s smellscapes continuously have been changing and evolving according to socio-cultural, economic, ecological, and political transformations. It locates different conflicted smellscapes that defined the city’s atmosphere and explores how these smells affected Lublin’s citizens and their everyday life. See: http://lublinsmellscapes.eu

Stephanie Weismann studied Comparative Literature, German Philology and Slavic Studies at the Universities of Vienna and St.Petersburg/Russia and earned her PhD within the program “Habsburg Galicia and Its Multicultural Heritage” at the University of Vienna with a monograph on “The Potential of Periphery. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836 – 1895) and Galicia” [Wiener Galizien-Studien, Bd.2, Vienna University Press, V&R 2017].

Her research interests are: sensory history, urban smellscapes, history of everyday life in East Central Europe and Russia in the 19th and 20th century.

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Agata Zysiak

Institute of Advanced Study

USA

Agata Zysiak – a sociologist of culture working at the Institute of Social Studies, Warsaw University, a member at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton 2017/2018. Her main areas of interest are urban studies and historical sociology; author of the award-winning book about socialist university and upward mobility in postwar Poland, “Punkty za pochodzenie” (Point for social origin, 2016) and co-author of “Opowiedzieć uniwersytet” (To tell university, 2015) and „From Cotton and Smoke – Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity 1897–1994” (2018).